Chris O

30 min warmup and feeling not that great. Add some intensity and then things start moving, clicking, feeling better. Energy, and rhythm flow with sustained power, feeling great and like I can keep going and going. What is happening from an energetic, hormone, physiological standpoint? What governs the switch? Is it an energy switch from glycogen to fat stores? Sweating out the bad mojo, or something else? I've noticed this enough that, as a biologist, I am curious.

Chris

Chris O

Posted in Road Cycling forum too. 30 min warmup and feeling not that great. Add some intensity and then things start moving, clicking, feeling better. Energy, and rhythm flow with sustained power, feeling great and like I can keep going and going. What is happening from an energetic, hormone, physiological standpoint? What governs the switch? Is it an energy switch from glycogen to fat stores? Sweating out the bad mojo, or something else? I've noticed this enough that, as a biologist, I am curious.

Chris

rousseau

Gotta be endorphins released in response to the stress on the body, innit? (says a guy with no business suggesting that he has any reliable knowledge of the physiology of the human body at all).

cb400bill

Merged duplicate threads. Please do not cross post.

MoAlpha

Full vasodilation, mobilization of energy stores (too early for glycogen depletion), muscle length-tension adaptation, more efficient muscle energy utilization with temperature rise, and maybe the first squirt of cortisol? The rest is probably “in your head” and in my experience that feeling does not correlate very well with actual performance. Also, if I get that feeling after less than a couple of days of rest, I’m not training very hard.

wphamilton

I've noticed the same thing and it does seem strange. It takes me 8-10 minutes to warm up on a bike and sometimes I'd feel sluggish and seriously consider aborting the ride, and then I kick it up,it lines out and an hour later I wonder what was I thinking, it feels great.

When running it's more like I expect, 2-3 minutes and my heart rate suddenly drops 20-30 bpm and it's easy again, which I attribute to warmer blood and muscles, and less restricted blood vessels allowing more oxygen to be delivered. I think something more is involved when cycling*

*what MoAlpha said makes sense. I don't think it's psychological though - maybe it's dependent on how well we're adapted to the particular activity?

Carbonfiberboy 

The better my conditioning, the longer it takes me to warm up. When I'm in really good shape, it takes about an hour. Trying to go hard before I'm really warmed up is very depleting. After, not so much. It takes about 20 minutes just for my lungs to open so I can easily breathe deep and fast. No, I don't know what's going on either for sure. My best guess is that nitric oxide production is causing my blood vessels to dilate. Of course there are also many hormones involved, See: https://www.bike.nyc/blog/news/this-...ts-of-cycling/ My guess here is that if we train consistently, our glands take longer to release these good hormones.

I know an ADHD rider who has to either ride a lot or run or go nuts.

Clyde1820

Isn't that an interesting aspect of athleticism and conditioning?

Experienced it myself, with running. Vastly better performances when warming up gradually and fully, else "very depleting" as you say. Can't say that I've ever heard another speak of it in those terms, but I certainly found it to be true in my own case.

Found that I had a limited amount of time and effort over which I could be at "near-peak" output. Better conditioning, of course, eventually resulted in greater amounts of time at such levels of output. Found, also, that if I rushed it getting to that point, rushed the warm-up and the ramp-up phase, by attempting an overall faster or harder effort, I would often end up with nothing left in the tank before the route was completed.

But if warming up slowly, slowly increasing speeds and awaiting the "right" time, and by taking an interval approach to my near-peak portion of the route (or race), I found I could have dramatically improved overall times. Even though covering much greater distances once warmup + ramp-up + high-performance portions were added up.

Go figure. But it was true. Made hard runs much more satisfying, to know how much more I could squeeze from a race when listening to the body instead of playing the "numbers" game (ie, shooting for a fixed "faster" per-mile split across the course).

Never hit it that hard on the bikes, but I can't see how it wouldn't have worked there as well, at high output levels.

Hermes

A couple of years ago, I focused on sprint training. Old school sprinters took a long time to warm up and generally rode slowly with a gradual buildup of force compared to endurance racers. Some of the logic went like this...sprinters have more muscle mass and take longer to warmup. The shorter the race the longer the warmup.

Then the Brits come along in 2012 and did very well in the olympics. Short warmups (not much riding but rest between warmup efforts) and hot pants to keep the legs hot until they were called to race. My sprint coach wanted me to do a 12 minute accelerating warmup. Rest 5 minutes and then 3x10 second accelerations with 1' RBA. Rest 10 minutes then 30 seconds high power effort. Rest and one moderate standing start. Put on leg warmers, rest 20 minutes then race.

The goal is keep muscle freshness while warming up the energy producing systems without generating too much fatigue.

Executing the shorter warmup is as much mental as physical. A long warmup with lots of spinning feels fantastic but makes you slow. The brain loves things that feel good. The training is to get the brain used to less warmup while simultaneously getting it to allow a max effort on legs that just do not feel "as good" but in reality are very fresh and ready to generate a lot of power.

So one keeps practicing the warmup routine with workouts and races and tuning it slightly for the individual. Today, I do not need or want a long warm up. Goodbye old school and dogma.

Clyde1820

^ IMO, that's the key.

Individuals' make-up and capability varies so widely, from what I've seen, that a given method might not work nearly as well for several in a group but be a spot-on method for some. In my case, I ran competitively for some years, and found that for middle-distance running races (whether hills/tough or flats/faster) my own body responded most effectively with the longer, relatively less-bursty type warm-up periods. Tried all methods I could, over many years. Never found another runner for whom it worked as well, among all the competitors I met over the years. Always chalked that up to "everyone's different."

Wouldn't call it "old school dogma" but would recognize that each athlete can differ greatly enough that quite significant differences in warm-up and training regimens can create widely different impacts upon performance.

May we all find what works for us, in athletics, in the end. Very satisfying.

Hermes

Team Enios, formerly Team Sky, dramatically reduced the warmup time for time trials since much like sprinting. too much warmup creates fatigue and increases time. But yet another instance where long warmups produce negative results. Once again, the way we have always done it is not as effective as newer methods.

Professional and amateur teams use science and practical data to determine what training protocols athletes follow. The athletes do what the coaches say to do. That is also true for individual athletes that use coaches. We do what they say even if it at first makes us feel uncomfortable or less effective. And sometimes, it takes time for a new protocol to work versus working right away.

Of course, if an athlete sits on the top of the pyramid and always wins, then he or she is free to do what "works for them".

Carbonfiberboy 

It's not only that individuals may have different responses to various warmup routines. My guess is that much of those differences lie in differences in events and in the individual's training for those events. So when we comment on what sort of warmup works for us, we should include what our training and target events are, exactly as Hermes has done.

My target events are long rides of between 60 and 160 miles and 3000'-10,000' of climbing. The low end of that range are really just training rides for the high end ones. I do the usual weekday training with a mix of endurance and interval days. I spend one weekend day on race simulations, i.e. group rides with friends, starting at 40 miles and going up to 70 miles, mostly done on a tandem with my wife to create increased training load. Over that, the rides are on my single because I have to do my event rides on my single now that I am older.

My warmup consists of starting out with my droogs. We gradually raise the pace and start bumping it on the hills after a bit. I lay out the courses, so I lay out ones which are favorable to my warmup strategy, and that seems to work for everyone. My long rides are all about conserving energy and titrating the pain. If I "wasted" my energy on warmups like Hermes', I'd have to drop off early. If he warmed up like I do, he'd come in way down in the standings. Back when I used to do short TT's, I'd warmup doing hill sprints since I don't own a normal trainer. That worked well enough.

jadocs

I have experienced exactly this. On those occasions, 18-19mph felt like a 22mph effort, almost like someone was holding on to my seat post or riding on flat tires. On the flip side when doing shorter/higher intensity warmups 20-21mph felt like 18mph. The above were solo rides.

In group rides where I'm in a draft, occasionally it feels like 40-60 min until I get warmed up. I attribute this to my brain getting used to being comfortable due to not working so hard.